Sarmada Read online

They were content with the perks of the Writers' Union, which was essentially a place where the intellectuals were kept, where they could bleat their slogans about resisting imperialism and the oppressive Zionist enemy while at the same time praising the rulers who'd taken a stand against liberty and liberation and instituted the harshest, most illegitimate, and most repressive regime in the history of the country, indeed in the history of the entire region.

  They eventually reduced culture in Syria to one color and shape, especially after the death, imprisonment, and exile of the communists who'd refused to sell out so cheaply. Only a handful remained—all friends of Khalil—and they elevated whoever they felt like elevating and snootily cast out anyone who couldn't insinuate himself into their little group and its gatherings.

  The scabby leftist culture-claque needed to recruit someone from the mountain region so they could pretend to be antisectarian and plural-minded nationalists. Khalil was exactly who they'd been looking for, and they promptly proclaimed him the “Neruda of Syria.” The people of Sarmada, on the other hand, took great delight in the graffiti attacking the two most despised men in the village. As usual, they went easy on Bulkhayr and his punishment was limited to a verbal dressing down and six raps on the knuckles with the edge of a ruler, but Fayyad, well, now he was hauled up onto the cabinet and had his feet whipped until they swelled up, as if he were a war criminal. As you can well imagine, the punishment didn't put the boys off, it just made them more careful.

  The boys spent their days wondering about the one question that plagued them constantly: how could they pass the hardest test of all? The one that would allow them to put aside childish games and join Sarmada's gang of young men?

  Before they could take the next step and join the older boys, they had to undergo the ritual that marked the transition from childhood to young-manhood. It took place at the western pond, where the last of the water in the valley pooled in a large depression. There it remained throughout the summer, the perfect place for the children to swim and play. Fayyad and Bulkhayr, who were both dying to join the village gang, would have to put on a show for the older boys. But when the time finally came, Fayyad had second thoughts about masturbating in front of all the other boys. They only had one chance to prove that they could ejaculate—that they'd become men—but if they failed, they'd be bullied relentlessly, so Fayyad decided he wouldn't take part. Bulkhayr stood by his friend and also refused to perform, though he had to fight back his rage when they were subjected to Ramez Donkeyshit's jeering abuse—and yet Ramez still let them watch the induction ceremony of the other three boys who'd come to the pond.

  The pubescent boys stood in a row in front of the crowd and then the show began: they took off their trousers and sat down on the bank of the brackish water, and then as Ata the impish storyteller told them about his experiences with gypsy women, the boys began to play with their dainty privates. Ata repeated the same story, adding constant embellishments, calling to mind how the gypsy woman smelled and how he attained the deepest depths of pleasure, sliding into a moist, velvety vagina and thrusting feverishly into her behind as she cried with delight. He threw in all those details and a lot more. Every time he told the story, he added a few scenes he'd seen on Israeli television, which broadcast “erotica,” although that was just what people called it, in truth they were just comedies that didn't have the hot scenes edited out. The story grew only more passionate as the fists gripping the strained members shuttled and shook ever more fervidly, and the boys were lost in their own imaginations, horny and holding back moans, and then the older boys were suddenly cheering and their task was complete, and that wide new world they'd been dying to get into finally welcomed them.

  Ata stood up and congratulated the boys, and then he performed the last rite. He cut the stem of a yellow-flowered plant called milk thistle and gave a few drops of the golden, alkaline sap to each boy and made him rub the stinging drops on his penis to make it grow—so it was said—but actually only to make it swell and to make the boys suffer days of unbearable pain, with tears in their eyes but stupid proud smiles on their faces.

  Bulkhayr tried to get Fayyad to go through with the performance because if he didn't prove to the older boys that he was able to ejaculate, he would never be allowed to join that other world, or get to go on trips to the brothels in Damascus with the gang, or accompany them on raids of gypsy women, or listen to the adults' sex-soaked stories, or learn how to ride Ata's motorcycle for almost no money at all. He'd be just a boy for the rest of his life, forbidden from taking part in that other, unseen side of Sarmada. But Fayyad was scared. He told Bulkhayr that what had happened to Essam, the son of Mamdouh the shopkeeper, had scared him, and he was worried that it might happen to him—that he, too, might fail the test, and then the older boys would start to molest him and treat him as if he were a girl.

  He was entirely right, of course: their burning passion had them raping farm animals and just waiting for someone like Essam they could penetrate. In the end the only thing Essam could do was dress himself in a hood and loose trousers and become a shaykh who never left the majlis, putting an end to his worldly life, and saving his ass too, because no one dared lay a hand on a young shaykh who was protected by the Holy Spirit, the five cosmic principles and God Himself!

  Fayyad began testing his penis in private while looking at pictures of the actress Yusra because that small erection was his key to a greater world. Then Bulkhayr happened upon the solution when he discovered that the boys were also allowed to prove their manhood at Stone-deaf's terebinth tree.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” he asked Fayyad.

  “No, I'm going to go on my own. I'll tell you what happens later.”

  From far away, Sarmada looks like it's stripping off its clothes after a warm summer's day, getting ready to await another morning. My camera snaps shots, panning wide frame over a landscape of seduction and mystery. Yes, I lived here once, but now it's as if I'm from somewhere else. The sleeping village offers its dreams up to my waking mind and my wakefulness selects only what agrees with my memories to form a new landscape. I wondered whether Azza Tawfiq would ever see what I saw. Would she ever hear behind the sounds, or deep below them? I needed to speak to her. To ask her once more: Are you sure you're Hela Mansour?

  If you want to really know yourself, you should stand stark naked in front of the mirror and get dressed very slowly; then leave. The last impression is the final impression. There's nothing deep down. Everything that happens rises up to the surface and is then spun off into new words. You just have to know how to gather them all. Learn how to write them down. Anyone who says we have to take advantage of time belongs to the machinery of work in contemporary life. To take advantage of time is to take advantage of others. Here in Sarmada, I discovered that time has no value. Only place can have value. Finding the right place: that's our precious mission. Time, we can't do anything about. Have I suddenly come down with a case of endings and over-withs? No, not yet.

  Stone-deaf Siman will take over the story, for the novel can end only in silence. Thus I, too, shall be silent now.

  The ancient tree stood in the quiet and tranquil wasteland and it was Stone-deaf Siman who'd discovered that the tree provided an incomparable means of proving manhood. The tree became a site of pilgrimage: fertility-seekers flocked to it from all across the country and picked its leaves, which they would steep along with chamomile, rosemary, and colocynth, to make a tea that would increase their fertility.

  Fayyad entrusted his fate to the blessed tree, which people said was actually just a woman of immense sexual appetite, profoundly lustful and debauched. She was never satisfied, one time she even slept with a whole division of the Nabatean army without so much as blinking. She lived in this same spot more than 2,100 years ago, an Ishtarite woman with divine breasts and a voluptuous rear. She’d originally been abducted by a genie, but the king of the genies took a liking to her and he married her instead. He had to throw her out after a whil
e, though, on account of how lascivious and fecund she was. She’d corrupted the entire underworld, so she was sent back to the world of men with her fragrant vagina whose musk made humans swoon. She went on living like that, a slave to desire, until she was slain by a eunuch’s axe and was transformed into this peculiar terebinth tree.

  Stone-deaf Siman, who’d been the first to discover the tree’s capabilities, planted a hedge of cypress trees all around it and began to work as the tree’s pimp. He was probably the only tree pimp in the entire world, as a matter of fact. Soon the tree’s supple crevices and the hot resin bubbling up from its giant trunk made it the village boys’ favorite destination. To guard against surprise scratches, Siman had purchased a couple of kilos of off and putrid petroleum jelly and filled the suitable crevices. The shaykhs tried to spread rumors about him, that he’d been struck deaf and dumb once he’d started pimping out the tree and corrupting the young men in the village, but none of that mattered to Fayyad as he proudly and gaily regaled his friend with a full report of his experience.

  “I paid Stone-deaf Siman, the guy who guards the tree, three-quarters of a lira that I’d managed to save up in small coins, and then I dropped my trousers and took out my dick. I tested one of the holes with my finger. It was moist and sticky, so I stuck it in slowly and closed my eyes. It felt like the tree was blowing me. I wrapped my arms around it like it was Yusra, my sweetie. I could hear her whispering to me in Egyptian Arabic, she was saying, ‘Yeah! That’s it! You’re driving me wild! Oh, baby, oh, Fayyad!’ And then I busted inside the tree. The deaf guard was watching me the whole time and when I finished, he walked over and made sure that I'd actually come inside the tree. Then he gave me a thumbs up, like he was saying ‘Mission Accomplished!’”

  Bulkhayr laughed. “The deaf guy's still giving you a thumbs up. The whole of Sarmada's going to start treating you like a man from now on.”

  To make it official, Fayyad brought Stone-deaf Siman down to the spring with him. The boys had all gathered to find out the result from a few signs, and gestures of the head and hands, and then finally he gave Fayyad the all-okay sign with two thumbs straight up, and they understood that Fayyad had made it into their world. At that point, loony Safwan taunted from the crowd: “So what about you, Bulkhayr? Or is it still too soon for you?”

  Without answering, he dropped his trousers, stripped off his underwear, and revealed two penises, each more than seven inches in length. Some of the boys ran from the terrifying sight, while others watched, jaws gaping, as Bulkhayr wanked one of them furiously until he came and then moved onto the next one and finally completed the ritual of public masturbation in the midst of much cheering and singing from the others, who immediately elected him leader, despite his youth. He hadn't even turned twelve yet.

  The school trip would change both their lives forever. Principal Zaydoun had decided on a field trip to the famous shoe factory in the city and then to the top of the mountain to look out onto the miraculous meadow, where if you pour water on the road, it'll flow from low ground to high and where if the bus were parked at the bottom of the slope in neutral and the brakes were released, it would roll upward. This bemusing experience mystified the people of the mountains and visitors and, as is to be expected, plenty of apocryphal stories were invented—creatively, but illogically—to explain the vexing phenomenon.

  Of course, no one bothered to listen to the geologist as he tried to explain that it was all just an optical illusion and that the ground elevation wasn't as it seemed, and so the legendary explanations continued. Sarmada had a knack for, and sufficient practice at, taking something like that and turning it into a reason for faux-excitement, which spread from student to student as they awaited their upcoming trip.

  Their itinerary took them from the meadow vista to the Roum Dam—an achievement of the “blessed” revolution—and then onto the woods outside Kom al-Hisa, where they were going to have lunch. After lunch, they would visit the distillery where arak and wine were made, and finally end up at the shoe factory. The principal had contracted with Suhayb the bus driver to hire his big Scania bus for the trip.

  What Bulkhayr and Fayyad didn't know, though, was that the principal had hatched a conspiracy to change the departure time from seven to half-past-six so that they would miss the trip. It was really Fayyad the principal was after because he didn't want that idiot ruining the trip with his mischief. A half hour before the journey was scheduled to begin, the principal gave the head scout boys and the bus driver strict orders not to let that lazy waste of space onto the bus under any circumstances. He wanted to make it look like it was all the students' idea: “Do you lot want Fayyad coming on your trip?”

  “No, sir!” answered one of the students who'd had a taste of the troublemaker's fist. He was joined by the others, who were caught up in the thrill of exclusion and the validation of their principal's smile, which they only saw once every few months. The whole group had been turned against Fayyad and they were feeling pretty proud and pleased with themselves, as well as obviously being quite surprised that their legendarily heartless principal was scheming with them, bucking them up even, and that he’d promised them an unforgettable school trip on the sole condition that the little miscreant be left out.

  “Don’t worry about it, sir. We’ll see to it he never gets on the bus.”

  “It’s all up to you,” said the wicked principal. “You lot need to make a decision: do you want him on the trip or not? It’s not my problem.”

  They listened so closely that the morning drowsiness was wiped from their eyes, then they divided positions among themselves and one of them armed himself with the principal’s cane. Two of them hung onto the back staircase to fight off any attempts to latch onto their long-awaited journey and the biggest and best kickers stood by the door to keep him from getting onboard under any circumstances. As the bus was about to set off, Bulkhayr and Fayyad appeared in the distance, out from behind the ruined steamroller that squatted in the middle of the village, and they began to sprint as quickly as they could. Bulkhayr got to the door first and the students who’d been appointed as guards grabbed him and pulled him onto the bus. But when Fayyad reached out, expecting to get the same help, he got whacked on the head with the principal’s cane and he had no idea why. He backed off and tried to climb up the back staircase but they kicked him away and he stumbled, falling into the thorny bushes alongside the asphalt road, which looked to him like a black snake swallowing the bus up until all he could see was the sooty exhaust and that, too, began to dissipate. In the midst of a resoundingly silent morning pierced only by his staccato, wrenching sobs, he stood there and wept in the brittle emptiness. He implored them with futile cries, but the speed of the bus and the ecstasy of their principal’s complicity had made them into cruel and rabid little brutes. They stuck their heads out of the bus windows and pointed and gestured rudely, mocking the cry-baby who was running after them. Bulkhayr tried to stop them, but he got a punch to the face and a bloody nose for his trouble. He wanted to get off and begged Suhayb to stop the bus, but there was no point. So he started cursing at the students and trying to push past them to the back door, hoping to jump out and run back to his friend, but they held him back and knocked him down to the ground, where they kept him until the bus was far enough away, ignoring all his taunts and threats. The principal, meanwhile, was busy chatting to Ms. Camellia, reeling off his really quite impressive track record of imposing discipline on the students and the village at large, while she, for her part, tried to fake a bland smile as she wondered just how she'd managed to forget her maxi-pads on the counter at home and hide any signs of the abdominal cramps that accompanied her period, which had come that very morning and taken her by surprise.

  The only available outlet for Fayyad's vengeance was the flag that flew high above the school, so he tore it to shreds in a blind rage. After he'd returned, panting from his failed attempt to catch up with the bus, he sat down against the wall of the school, fighting back t
he tears that lit a fire in his heart and left him cursing the moment he'd ever been born into that shitty little village. He caught sight of the slack flag—the only moving thing he could see—and so he climbed up to the roof of the school and knocked down the flagpole, and then rabidly ripped the flag apart.

  This was the flag that had greeted him every morning for eight years. The flag he'd revered. He used to think that saluting the flag was a duty, that it wasn't even negotiable on chilly or frozen mornings, irrespective of stomachaches or stuffed noses. He'd always felt a special affection for that piece of cloth. Not saluting it was unthinkable—an act of treason, beyond the pale. It was exactly like the Baath party slogans he'd memorized and taken to heart, even though he didn't understand a word of them. The teacher who stood in front of the students and pierced the disciplinary air with his booming voice told them that they were being called on to help build one grand and unified Arab socialist society and to defend it, and Fayyad would raise his right hand as if swearing an oath—proud that his own husky voice was loudest of all. Tearing up the thing he'd loved most at the school was like taking revenge against all those brutal years, and it marked the end of a childhood that had been rather late in ending.

  Back on the bus, the students danced with the glee of a mission accomplished, but their joyous racket was beginning to annoy the principal, who, after all, was trying to have a conversation with the new female teacher. He interrupted himself to shout at them and thereby regain some of the dignity he'd traded away that morning. The students all returned to their seats and only Bulkhayr was left, raving and cursing, not giving a damn about the principal's authority. Bulkhayr sprung to his feet and punched the boy who'd punched him and the one who'd thrown him down on the ground. The one who'd covered his mouth and held him down got kicked in the balls. Principal Zaydoun was livid and couldn't control his tongue as he unleashed a torrent of abuse on troublemaking Bulkhayr, who would later come to see that moment as a fork in the road of his life.